Work resumed this week on the demolition of Ports O’ Call Village to make way for a new development on San Pedro’s waterfront.

Demolition crews tear down the Ports o Call Village in San Pedro Thursday November 8th, 2018. Alaska Seafood Restaurant was the latest building to fall to the bulldozers. Photo By Chuck Bennett

Piles of rubble were all that remained of the latest buildings to be demolished at the northern end of Ports O’ Call Village on San Pedro’s waterfront on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. Photo By Chuck Bennett

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The Asian Village and Alaska Seafood Restaurant are taken down at Ports O’ Call Village to make way for a new development, the San Pedro Public Market, that will be developed in the next two years. A member of the crew watches Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018, as an excavator removes the Alaska Seafood structure. Photo By Chuck Bennett

Demolition crews at Ports O’ Call Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018. Alaska Seafood Restaurant was the latest building to fall to the bulldozers. Photo By Chuck Bennett

An excavator with a giant claw crashed into what remained of Port’s O’ Call Village on San Pedro’s waterfront this week, creating a huge pile of rubble and opening up new water views of the Main Channel in the Port of Los Angeles.

Demolition, which began with some of the smaller shops in March and Acapulco Restaurant in May to make way for a new waterfront development, resumed aggressively this week and is expected to continue through most of the rest of this year.

Heavy machinery took down the Alaska Seafood Restaurant, the cluster of shops branded as the Asian Village (originally created as the Fishermen’s Village) at the northern end of the village and a tile-roofed structure that still had a front door awning that read “Ice Cream.”

The now-empty two-story building that housed Ports O’ Call Restaurant, which opened in 1961 and was the first piece of Ports O’ Call Village, is tentatively slated to come down the week of Nov. 26, according to a Port of Los Angeles spokesman.

By the end of this year, according to plans, the only structure that will be left in Ports O’ Call Village will be the San Pedro Fish Market and adjacent Crusty Crab, business that will remain open throughout construction of the new San Pedro Public Market.

Construction is expected to begin sometime in 2019 with an opening date slated for 2020 or early 2021.

The take down of Ports O’ Call Village, once a thriving string of quaint shops and restaurants connected by cobblestone pathways, has been painful for many residents to watch.

But the New England-style shops became run down and fell on hard times by the late 1980s and 1990s.

Ever since, discussions have been ongoing about how to redevelop the waterfront.

Donna Littlejohn has covered the Harbor Area as a reporter since 1981. Along with development, politics, coyotes, battleships and crime, she writes features that have spotlighted an array of topics, from an alligator on the loose in a city park to the modern-day cowboys who own the trails on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. She loves border collies and Aussie dogs, cats, early California Craftsman architecture and most surviving old stuff. She imagines the 1970s redevelopment sweep that leveled so much of San Pedro's historic waterfront district as very sad.